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H-1B UPDATE
Good news on the Hatch bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee met Thursday and marked up the bill, defeating an amendment to weaken the legislation and passing the bill by an overwhelming margin of 16 to 2. Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy proposed an amendment to cut the raising of the cap from 200,000 to 145,000. His amendment would also have raised the H-1B fee to as much as 00. Kennedy's amendment would have earmarked the increased funding for job training and education. Instead, an amendment sponsored by California Democrat Diane Feinstein and Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Spencer Abraham that will allocate H-1B application fees to fund National Science Foundation projects (but will not raise H-1B application fees) passed.
The bill next heads for a vote on the floor of the Senate. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the chances are now excellent that the Senate will pass an H-1B bill. Issues that remain unresolved include increased fees, labor protections and the final size of the increase in the visa numbers.
Also, the INS has announced that through February 15, 2000, about 67,000 cases had been counted toward the annual limit on H-1B visas, which, this year is 115,000.  There were also 44,000 cases in the pipeline, although the INS has no way of knowing how many of these are subject to the annual cap.  The announcement in which this news was revealed made no mention of the INS' position on the alleged over-issuance of visas last year, nor whether, if the INS does decide it issued too many, it would apply those wrongly issued to this year's cap. 
The INS does say that when it determines the cap is about to be reached, it will follow the notification procedures it developed last year. 
The Nebraska Service Center has announced that as of March 8, 2000, it was adjudicating cases with notice dates before January 11, 2000. 
- Lamar Smith's H-1B restriction bill is now online.
- The Cato Institute has released a paper entitled "The H-1B Straightjacket: Why Congress Should Repeal the Cap on Foreign-Born Highly Skilled Workers" by Suzette Brooks Masters and Ted Ruthizer.